Staff Sgt. James Wilson survives battleground but loses a war with another enemy

The truck barreled past Robert Rafferty as the light turned green. Rafferty swerved and slammed the brakes.

The 1996 Jeep Grand Cherokee veered off into the opposite lane where Eisenhower Boulevard dips under the Pennsylvania Turnpike overpass in Lower Swatara Township. It hit the curve and flipped over twice, landing on the roof.

Rafferty jumped out of his car.

A man had crawled halfway out of the driver’s door. He was bald and wore a brown jacket.

“Hey, mister, are you OK?” Rafferty asked.

“Yeah,” said the man on the ground.

The truck was on fire.

“I have to get you out of here,” Rafferty said.

“OK,” said the man.

Rafferty leaned to pull him out, but the man reached back for something in the truck.

That man, Staff Sgt. James C. Wilson — Jimmy to everyone who knew him — had always carried a gun. A fascination kindled at a young age in the woods near his father’s Huntingdon home had lured him into the military and law enforcement.

Wilson men always had guns. Stewart Wilson carried his into battle when he joined the Union Army. Chester Wilson, Jimmy’s dad, had dozens of guns in his house. You never know when you’re going to come across some weirdo, they liked to say.

Wilson rarely missed his target. When he did, he set off into the woods and tracked the deer.

He used that sharp eye to patrol the dust-choked fields and neighborhoods of the Zabul province in Afghanistan. Wilson rarely missed a sniper nor failed to spot a roadside bomb. He had become a role model to the young men in his National Guard platoon. Many had never seen action.

At 42, Wilson had seen men blown to pieces inches from him, their blood splattering his face. He had seen children disguised in burqas used as suicide bombers, blown apart along with anyone in proximity.

Nothing frazzled Wilson. Not the enemy. Not the snipers. Not the landmines. Not the drug dealers he chased as a cop. Wilson was fearless. The Marine Corps had drilled that into him. “You eyeball me, boy, I’ll smack you,” he liked to taunt.

Wilson returned home in November, the Pennsylvania National Guard’s Company C, 1st Battalion, 110th Infantry having finished its 10-month tour in Afghanistan. Wilson had volunteered for it two years ago when he returned from his tour with the 56th Stryker Brigade in Iraq.

He was getting back to civilian life.

The Highspire Police Department had given him back his job, and Wilson had just signed a lease on an apartment in town. He bought a few pieces of furniture, and he and Chester — Chet as all his friends called his dad — talked about refurbishing old trucks.

But for months Wilson battled another enemy.

A stray tear every now and then betrayed what anguish dwelled in his heart. Wilson had lost men — close friends. Wilson had always been a heavy drinker, but now he chased their memories away with vodka.

This last tour had changed him. His friends saw the cracks in his armor, but Wilson seldom talked about it. He guarded his emotional torment. Suck it up, he used to say. It was the soldier way.

On the evening of Sunday, March 20, the daylight waning, Wilson, returning home from a friend’s house, had his favorite gun next to him, the Glock 17 his father had shipped to him when he was a young Marine in Kuwait. Wilson had wanted it for back up. “You just never know,” he would say.

Wilson was halfway out the driver’s side when Rafferty got to him. The windows had shattered. Glass shards punctured his back.

Family and friends search their hearts for an explanation as to why Wilson — with things finally looking up — did what he did next.

Did he have a flashback, Chester Wilson asks. His son always said he would never be captured. He would rather die than let the enemy get him.

Was he trying to take cover, his mind tricking him into thinking he was out on one of the barren Afghanistan fields riddled with the improvised explosive devices that had killed his men?

Was the prospect of another DUI — the possibility he might lose his job with Highspire — too much to bear?

Had his torment simply crushed his heart?

Wilson reached back into the truck.

A soldier is trained to always know where his gun is. Wilson found his and killed himself.

Detached and distant

Terry Eutzy II knew something was bothering his friend when more than a week after returning home from Afghanistan, he had not called.

Eutzy’s farm was down the road a couple of miles from Chester Wilson’s house. Jimmy Wilson loved helping around his friend’s farm, driving tractors, bailing hay and feeding the cows. Every time Wilson came back from training or a tour, the first thing he did was call Eutzy.

They would go camping, hunting, or just drink beer and drive around in his truck looking for trouble. Adolescent stuff, Eutzy said. Once they pulled a for-sale sign out of someone’s yard and stuck it in the lawn of a friend’s farm. “Jimmy was always professional at work,” Eutzy said. “But up here at the farm, he was the outlaw. The wannabe redneck.”

They always had a loaded gun in the truck, in case they saw deer.

When two weeks went by, Eutzy drove up to Wilson’s camp, a trailer on about 15 acres of woods that provided a retreat for Wilson. The guys hung out there, mostly during hunting season, but Wilson went there when he needed solitude. His two Labradors had the run of the place.

Eutzy pulled up to the long driveway around 7 that morning. Wilson was sitting on the porch. His gun rested on the banister. “I saw him look at it as to make sure he knew where it was,” Eutzy said. “He looked at me funny. I almost want to feel like he forgot who I was.”

Eutzy walked up to the porch. Why didn’t you call, he asked his friend. “I didn’t want to see anybody. I just want to be left alone,” Wilson said.

He had been up since 2 a.m. and the bottle of whiskey in his hand was nearly empty.

“What’s going on?” Eutzy asked.

“I told you I want to be left alone,” Wilson said.

Wilson seemed detached, distant. The Wilson he knew was a big-hearted guy who hugged his friends, picked them off the ground and roughed them up.

“He’d hang on to you like you were a stuffed animal,” Eutzy said. “He was lonely. He was a very touchy-feely person.”

Eutzy had heard his friend tell stories about security patrol duty, the landmines, booby traps, bunker attacks. He had heard stories of the men Wilson lost — some right in front of him. The men who went home without legs. Wilson rarely opened up, but when he did, he teared up.

“He was pretty emotional about it,” Eutzy said. “He would tell what he could tell then toughen up and get over it. That was his job.”

Wilson had not seen green grass in four months, he told Eutzy. A memory tormented him.

Sgt. First Class Robert James Fike and Staff Sgt. Bryan Alan Hoover had shipped out to Afghanistan with Wilson in Charlie Company. The three became good friends. Wilson, Fike and Hoover liked to head back to their tents at the end of the day and have a few beers.

On June 11, 2010, out on a security patrol, Fike and Hoover were killed by a suicide bomber.

“He definitely was messed up because of the things he saw and [had] done, but he didn’t get into a lot of detail,” Eutzy said. “He’d say my platoon, my unit went out. We got attacked. This person got killed, but he didn’t go into a lot of detail about it.”

Wilson dealt with other memories, other men he had lost in Desert Storm and Iraq.

“You can’t erase stuff like that,” Chester Wilson said.

Eutzy, for the first time, was concerned about how much his friend was drinking.

“I definitely could tell each time that he would come home he was changed,” Eutzy said. “A part of me wants to say mentally disturbed. Part of me wants to say he was homesick. He was tired of playing soldier.”

‘Good luck guilt’

Soldiers carry the moral weight of war as they struggle with a sense of duty and the ravages of combat — wounds, casualties and the stress of staying alive.

Nancy Sherman, a philosopher, ethicist and psychoanalyst, explores that thesis in her book, “The Untold War: Inside the Hearts, Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers.” Sherman writes that returning warriors are hyper vigilant, easily excited and provoked. Flashbacks and nightmares torment them. A survivor guilt leads them to abuse alcohol or drugs and detach from family and friends.

“I think a lot of soldiers like Jimmy really have this awful moral anguish,” said Sherman, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University. “I think of it as a good luck guilt. It’s the ‘I don’t deserve to be lucky, to have outlived my buddies. Why should I have been standing three inches away and have not been blown to pieces but he was?’ There’s a sense that by being alive, you betrayed the dead.”

Soldiers often have such an abiding sense of protecting each other’s back. When they dodge a hit, they feel as though they’ve broken a sacred bond, Sherman said.

“You want to bring everyone home whole,” she said. “When you can’t do that, you feel like you failed in your responsibility. So you feel responsible for their deaths.”

Almost monthly, a combat veteran — almost always a man — perpetrates a deadly violent act. Many take their own lives. Others, like Matthew Magdzas, capture national attention with the magnitude of their desperation.

A year ago, Magdzas, a Superior, Wis., National Guard soldier, adrift since his 2007 return from Iraq, unloaded his 9-mm semiautomatic pistol into his wife, his 13-month-old daughter and the family’s three dogs. He delivered his 14th and last fatal shot to his right temple.

Stories like that of Magdzas, the subject of a comprehensive “Time” magazine expose on the alarming rate of suicides and violence among troops deployed since Sept. 11, 2001, have spurred military leaders to look at the correlation between post-traumatic stress and suicide.

The pattern and rates are particularly troubling among National Guard troops, many of whom have seen multiple deployments.

Last year, a military system grappling with this new reality outlined an inadequate mental health system — riddled with critical shortages in staff and resources — and incapable of meeting the demands of combat fatigue troops.

In 2010, 111 National Guard soldiers killed themselves, a rate 78 percent higher than it was in 2009 when the service counted 62 suicides among its returning troops. The number of National Guard soldiers who have killed themselves exceeds that of active duty soldiers in the Army. As of July 1, the National Guard had confirmed 22 suicides among combat veterans and was investigating 20 deaths, according to the public affairs office of the National Guard.

In February, the acting director of the Army National Guard vowed to make the rate of suicides among veterans one of the military’s highest priorities.

“My take on that is we need to build a more resilient force, and we need to become more resilient as a nation,” Army Maj. Gen. Raymond Carpenter told the 2011 Reserve Officer Association National Convention.

The number of suicides among Pennsylvania National Guard mirrors this troubling pattern: In 2003, the service recorded one suicide, followed by two the next year. In 2007, four Pennsylvania reservists committed suicide. The number fluctuated in the years since, with two in 2009 and three in 2010. So far this year, two Pennsylvania Guardsmen have committed suicide.

“We need to find a way to reach out to our soldiers and connect them with the help they need and be able to build some of that training that can help them. That’s what we have to do for our soldiers,” said Maj. Cory Angell, a 20-year veteran and spokesman for the Pennsylvania National Guard at Fort Indiantown Gap.

Military service men and women have always carried the burden of war. But these days, National Guard soldiers — once tasked with responding to floods and college campus riots — bear that weight in ways rarely, if ever, seen.

Returning soldiers find it difficult to shake off the vestiges of a new type of warfare.

“You always wonder is this an insurgent or a civilian,” Sherman said. “It’s hard to discriminate the enemy. You are trained to engage and kill yet you have to restrain force.”

Combat survival mode can carry over stateside.

Road rage — and car accidents — are a significant issue among veteran National Guard soldiers, many of whom are trained to avoid RPGs or IEDs, Sherman said. A Jeep can trigger deadly reflexes.

“It bodily feels like you are driving in a war zone,” Sherman said. “It’s hard to tamp that down the hyper vigilance, the hyper arousal you get when you are behind the wheel. War has a rush energy that civilian life doesn’t have. Adjusting to that quieter tempo is a huge challenge.”

The military has started to debrief returning soldiers on making the transition from driving under combat situations to civilian roads, Angell said.

“They make us all aware that you are not back in Iraq,” he said. “You are not driving in downtown Baghdad, not driving a supply route that’s filled with IEDs.”

National Guard troops step down from jobs when called to duty, and often struggle to find jobs once they return to civilian life. They lack the support and camaraderie found on military bases. Re-entry is stark: Guards go from fighting one day to civilian life overnight.

“If you are Guard, you are not on a base and not with your buddies you served with, which can be helpful,” Angell said. “They know what you went through. You were side by side. Now you are with other people who don’t know what you went through.”

Focus on mental fitness

Fort Indiantown Gap processes about 19,000 reservists from more than 100 communities across the state.

“They come here to train but a lot of that stuff that’s available for families in regular Army, isn’t necessarily readily available to ours,” Angell said. “That is a challenge that the National Guard faces that regular Army doesn’t have to deal with.”

The greatest challenge is motivating soldiers to seek help.

In 2008, a Rand Corporation study found that nearly 20 percent of military service members who had returned from Iraq and Afghanistan reported symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder or depression. Only slightly more than half of those reporting symptoms sought treatment.

“We are talking about warriors. They are tough,” Angell said. “We go on road marches and get blisters. We gotta carry heavy backpacks and equipment and armor. It’s tough and hard work. We’re trained to suck it up and drive on. That attitude is good in a lot of ways but can be detrimental once a soldier has problems and they need to reach out to somebody.”

Angell said his military branch has improved the mental health resources available to reservists since 9/11, largely because of its changing role.

“We went from a force that was essentially operating one week a month and were strategic reserve,” he said. “Now, if you are in the National Guard, you expect to be deployed.”

Fort Indiantown Gap has seen more than 25,000 individual mobilizations since 9/11, Angell said. The largest deployment — the 56th Stryker Brigade in 2009 with more than 4,000 troops — was the biggest deployment since the Korean War, when the whole 28th Division shipped to Europe. The war on terror accounts for the largest combat deployment since World War II.

An Army that has traditionally focused on the physical fitness of its soldiers is now parceling that focus on to the mental fitness of its troops. In an effort to help soldiers better handle the pressures of combat, multiple deployments, and family and financial crises, the Army has launched a $125-million resiliency program called the Comprehensive Soldier Fitness, modeled on a 12-step program.

Many of the programs are implemented upon deployment, and increasingly engage families to deal with stressors and to identify potential problems.

Fort Indiantown Gap recently finished a round of training for 14 “master resiliency trainers” who will work closely with returning soldiers. The base hopes to have 18 to 20 trainers by the end of the fiscal year, with the goal of having upwards of 48 trainers.

“We still have a ways to go to have somebody trained in each company,” Angell said.

The Pentagon runs the largest and second most-expensive health care system next to Medicare. Taking care of returning and retired military personnel and their families must remain a top priority, Sherman said.

“It’s immoral to send soldiers to war if you are not going to take care of them when they get home, but it’s not cheap,” she said.

‘He was always tough’

Jimmy Wilson wasn’t cut out for school. He struggled and had horrible grades.

Wilson transferred out of Central Dauphin High School and enrolled at Dauphin County Technical School.

A few weeks after he graduated in 1986, he joined the Marines. Wilson would finally come into his own, putting behind what was at times a troubled childhood. His parents’ short-lived marriage had been wrecked by alcohol and fighting. Wilson was 8 when he went to live with his father.

Jimmy got his love of hunting, fishing, guns and playing ball from Chester.

“We were me and him for a long time,” said Chester, his son, Jimmy, staring back from the same piercing blue eyes, the father-son resemblance. “He always told me I was more of a big brother to him than I was his dad. We did everything together.”

Jimmy’s estranged relationship with his mother had deteriorated over the years. When he died, Jimmy Wilson had not seen his mother in 12 years.

Wilson loved being a Marine.

“He was always tough,” said Chester, who served three years in the Army back in the early 1960s. “He’d go, when he was in the Reserves, he’d say ‘Jesus Christ that’s basic training in the Marines. If you are a Marine you get that from the get- go.’ He was always busting on those guys.”

At the end of his four years, Wilson extended. The first Gulf War was about to start. He wanted to be a part of it. Wilson shipped out to Kuwait.

He earned meritorious citations from the Marine Corps for superior performance and leadership. When he returned, he seemed more mature. Those close to him saw a changed man.

“He lost men — good friends. Bang — he’d hit the table and the tears start rolling and bam, he’d be done,” Chester Wilson said.

Wilson found it hard to shake it off. He began to drink heavily and to have nightmares, tremors and sweats.

“He had a lot of things he needed to work out from coming home from Desert Storm,” said Billie-jo Sedlacek, the young woman Wilson met one summer in Myrtle Beach, S.C.

Sedlacek and Wilson courted for nearly three years before they married in 1999, his fellow Marines saluting the couple before a horse and carriage whisked them away.

But the storybook marriage quickly frayed as Sedlacek watched her husband ease his torment with alcohol. Sedlacek said it was post traumatic stress syndrome.

“A lot of it was the fact that there were a lot of young kids that were shooting at them, that they had befriended,” said Sedlacek, who is remarried and lives in Philadelphia. “And all of the sudden they have to shoot back at them. Essentially 12-year-old soldiers. That’s got to be tough.”

Sedlacek urged her husband to seek counseling. He refused.

“He always felt that if you admit there’s something wrong with you, then you are succumbing to weakness,” she said. “He was very big on not showing weakness. He knew he was suffering. But that was always his thing, ‘You can handle anything.’ ”

Sedlacek forced Wilson to choose between marriage or alcohol. The two divorced in 2003.

That year, Wilson joined the National Guard.

Waiting for deployment, Wilson channeled his passion for guns and law enforcement with jobs in local police and sheriff’s departments.

“He’d always tell stories about how he’d go on drug raids and kick down doors. All the high action, high-speed chase,” Eutzy said. “He’d live for that. I always thought something would happen to him.”

Wilson was fearless.

“We went up against guys sometimes twice our size,” said Newport policeman Richard Behne, who worked alongside Wilson in the Perry County and the Dauphin County Sheriff’s Departments. “We were both 5’ 8”. They semi-resisted. But it wasn’t seconds we were on them. Even if he was by himself. He was taking no crap. He was a take-charge kind of guy.”

A former Army infantryman, Behne and Wilson shared combat stories.

“We both agreed there’s nothing wrong to think about it,” Behne said. “It happened in the past. Death is nothing somebody wants to see, at the same time it’s not something we want to gloat on. You think about it every day but to an extent.”

Wilson’s friends say alcohol didn’t make him angry, just more intimidating, obnoxious.

“Jimmy was a different kind of guy when he was drinking,” Behne said.

One weekend, Wilson locked himself up in his cabin near Newport and binged on vodka. When he started to fire his gun into the air, Behne stepped in.

He forced Wilson into his truck and drove him to the outpatient rehab program at Holy Spirit Hospital in East Pennsboro Twp.

“I pretty much think he had defeated everything at that point,” Behne said.

In some ways he had.

Few people knew Wilson had been married. Even fewer knew he had a son.

Wilson dated someone he met at his gym after his return from Desert Storm. Over the years, he would spend little time with Brett P. Strawser, the son born out of that brief relationship.

“Jimmy never had a lot of time for him,” Eutzy said.

A few months after completing the outpatient rehab program, Wilson was back to drinking.

In 2007, while working for the Highspire Police Department, Wilson was charged with driving under the influence and lost his license.

Wilson called his father to say he wouldn’t be able to get a hold of him for a few weeks. Wilson had turned himself in to rehab.

The next year, his unit mobilized for training before deploying to Iraq for an 8-month tour. Four months after returning from Iraq, Wilson volunteered to go to Afghanistan.

‘He showed us the ropes’

The two infantry companies that trained at Fort Indiantown Gap split into small teams after they deployed to Afghanistan and were assigned to five provincial reconstruction teams.

Wilson, Fike and Hoover belonged to the Provincial Reconstruction Team Zabul, a province less than two hours from the Pakistan border in an area notorious for deadly IEDs. Wilson was assigned to the capital of the province Qalat; Fike and Hoover to the village of Bullard.

Like other reconstruction teams in Afghanistan, the Zabul unit was made up of civilian and military personnel. Active duty Air Force, Navy, Army and Guard worked alongside Department of State and U.S. Agency for International Development officials to carry out civilian and humanitarian missions. The National Guard provided the security detail, combing the area for snipers, suicide bombers and roadside bombs.

“Jimmy called it the volunteer squad. He was head of that. He would always put them together,” said Neal Perry, a specialist assigned to Wilson’s platoon.

Wilson’s unit negotiated hordes of children against the risk that they could be used as decoys or booby trapped with explosives.

“You are always surrounded by tons of kids,” said Dan Shakal, a freelance photographer from Harrisburg embedded with Wilson’s unit. “They are always crawling around you, pulling pens, asking for candy. You’re always trying to pull them away from you because you’re still a target.”

The heat — on a good day — hovered at 105 degrees. Coming off patrol duty, the men peeled off their gear and clothes, sometimes just to put them back on a few hours later for another security sweep.

“Sometimes you’d go two, three weeks without a shower,” Shakal said.

The threat of roadside bombs was constant. Traveling the supply route between bases was done on high alert.

“You start to see things,” Shakal said. “An ant hill, dirt piled up. You learn to see it after a while. If you don’t, you’re in trouble. Disturbed earth. Recently dug. You don’t go near it. Some you can’t do anything about. They burrow under the road. Nothing you can do about it. They stay there until kids step on it.”

Perry, who was 18 when he arrived in Afghanistan, grew to rely on Wilson.

“He took a lot of us under his wings,” Perry said. “A lot of guys hadn’t deployed before. He showed us the ropes. He worked with us and got us up to par.”

Wilson was a formidable patrol leader.

“He’d spot things that nobody else could catch,” Perry said. “His eyes were pinned to that kind of thing.”

Once, coming off a 24-hour mission, Wilson, leading his men across a field to get back to the main road, noticed something: Tiny stones had been painted, the telltale signs of a potential landmine.

“He stopped us,” Perry said. “Nobody else had seen it. He stopped and looked around. We made it out of there.”

Wilson earned everyone’s respect.

“That was their sergeant,” Shakal said. “They did what he said. They looked up to him, and he took care of them. He made them come back. Some of the places they went were pretty bad. He always brought them back.”

At night, when he returned to his tent, Wilson was the jokester, the uncle figure, the one who got everyone laughing.

“He had a shaved head. I remember me and my roommate shaved our heads bald and we ran into his tent and said, ‘Look, Jimmy, we are like you,’ ” said Perry, who shipped back with Wilson in November and now lives in York.

“I trusted Jimmy 100 percent,” he said. “He was one of the guys I trusted the most out on the sector.”

On June 11, 2010, Fike and Hoover were on a patrol mission at the Bullard bazaar. Wilson was nearby in Qalat.

The men believe the Taliban disguised a young boy in a burqa, the traditional woman’s clothing of Afghanistan, and strapped him with explosives.

Fike and Hoover’s death hit the men hard.

“It was miserable being around the base,” Shakal said. “Morale dropped. But they knew what they had to do. They stuck it out and did their job. Nothing else to do.”

Wilson posted on Facebook: “It is what it is. Iraq to Afghanistan. The only thing missing is the handcuffs and blindfold we’re suppose to wear while we do our job.”

Questions linger

In October, Lorraine DeArmitt-Wilson found her son on Facebook and began to catch up on his life, learning of his police work and his tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, always fearful that something would happen to him in the line of duty.

DeArmitt is troubled by the difference in the photos of her son taken months apart — one while deployed, the face of a man confident, in his element. The other, a short time after he went back to Highspire, the face betraying a certain sadness.

“My son was a very strong person,” said DeArmitt, who lives in Harrisburg. “I look at this picture every night and I ask why? There wasn’t anything that he couldn’t get through. That he couldn’t deal with.”

Questions race through Chester Wilson’s mind.

Jimmy loved being a cop for Highspire. He was working overtime and making good money. If he intended to kill himself, he would’ve taken his .45, not the small Glock, Chester said.

He wonders if Jimmy had a flashback. Did he become disoriented in the moment of the accident? Jimmy always told him he would never let the enemy capture him. He would never be tortured. Did the gun go off accidentally, he wonders.

“I’m not a prayer man but the last couple of years, I’ve prayed a lot,” Chester said. “I really in my heart thought this would happen. I thought he would get killed as cop or soldier. He had no fear. He wasn’t scared of nothing.”

Chester knows Jimmy was hurting.

“He talked to me, ‘Hell, dad, stuff blew everywhere,’ ” Chester said. “Sometimes we’d be up there at camp and tears just start running down his face. He would never show any emotion sober.”

Wilson had not completed his Post Deployment Health Reassessment, a mandatory and comprehensive evaluation done at the three-month mark designed to identify any potential physical and mental problems. No record of Wilson’s reassessment is on file, Angell said.

Wilson wasn’t an all-around great guy. He could rub people the wrong way, but they mostly changed their minds once they got to know him.

“He got his picture in the paper. I remember that vividly. I thought he was pretty arrogant,” said Rebecca McCoy, a Highspire policewoman. “He was waving the magazine around. He was so proud. He said, ‘Read, read.’ I thought, what a jerk. Later, I got to know him. I fell in love with him. He had a pure heart.”

Wilson was a top-notch officer in good standing, said Sgt. Mark Stonebreaker of the Highspire Police Department.

“He was a super guy, and he had his demons,” he said. “You see signs of problems, and before you could act, it’s too late. There’s lots of us who saw the signs, but before we could talk about what course of action we could take, it was too late.”

Stonebreaker, a Gulf War veteran, said most soldiers return with invisible injuries “We all came back sick,” he said. “But they wouldn’t tell us what was wrong. They’d look into it but there’s no quick fix.”

On the evening of March 20, Jimmy was finally catching up with another friend, Mark Henninger, meeting his girlfriend at a family cookout. “He was in celebration mode,” he said.

Henninger was used to Jimmy’s heavy drinking, but that afternoon, he said, his friend was unusually drunk. Jimmy was sitting by the bonfire when the shadow of someone coming from behind startled him.

“Whether it was the soldier mode or the police mode, he unholstered his weapon,” Henninger said. “That’s when I thought, ‘I have to get him out of here.’ ”

Henninger insisted he would take him home. Jimmy refused.

“He said, ‘I’m a Guardsman. I’m a soldier. I’m a policeman. I can get myself home,’ ” Henninger said. His Highspire home is less than two miles from the scene of the crash.

‘A hero and a good person’

Chester has six of his son’s footlockers. He has yet to open them.

He has refurbished the Huntingdon home where he was born and spent his life. He shares it with his longtime companion Linda Ayers.

Jimmy’s Barracuda convertible sits out back, along with the old pickup trucks the two were going to refurbish.

Chester plans to put a flagpole up at the hunting camp so he can fly the flag he got at Jimmy’s funeral. The chocolate lab died recently. Symba, the yellow lab, remains at the camp, guarding alone.

Chester wanted to bury his son in his Marine uniform but only Marine medals could have been pinned on him. An Army uniform allowed him to be buried with both Army and Marine medals.

“He was a hell of a warrior,” Chester Wilson said. “He had medals I didn’t even know about.”

Hundreds of people attended the funeral. Uniformed personnel, military, police, EMTs, outnumbered civilians. Their cars choked the roads that climb through Huntingdon’s hills.

“The attendance at the funeral was enough to let anyone know he was a hero and a good person,” Eutzy said.

Jimmy Wilson is buried two miles from his dad’s house at Green Lea Cemetery in McAlevy’s Fort, alongside other Wilsons.

Chester said Jimmy probably didn’t realize how many people he had touched — how many respected him.

Chester last talked to Jimmy that Saturday night. Jimmy told him he was going to break up a drug gang Sunday night.

Featured Story

Get 'Today's Front Page' in your inbox

This newsletter is sent every morning at 6 a.m. and includes the morning's top stories, a full list of obituaries, links to comics and puzzles and the most recent news, sports and entertainment headlines.

optionalCheck here if you do not want to receive additional email offers and information.See our privacy policy

Thank you for signing up for 'Today's Front Page'

To view and subscribe to any of our other newsletters, please click here.